By Tiernan Ray

Following some initial thoughts this morning on Apple‘s (AAPL) retail debut of the new iPad Air, the revamped full-size tablet computer, by Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, Munster returned this afternoon with further man-in-the-street findings, and he was joined by some other sell-side folks publishing their views on the matter.

After counting people on line this morning, Munster interviewed 71 of them, and found that 75% of them were already iPad owners, higher than the 58% a year ago who were iPad owners when he surveyed those waiting at that time for the newly introduced iPad mini. (The new model of the iPad mini, with a “Retina Display,” does not go on sale until later this month.)

Munster concludes that most people are using a mini in tandem with the full-size iPad, and that replacement cycles are now about 23 months in duration:

Of the iPad Air buyers who already own an iPad (75%), only 18% expected to keep using the old device and essentially all of those users were owners of an iPad Mini. We noted a similar trend in our iPad Mini survey in that 76% of iPad Mini buyers expected to use the Mini along with their prior full-sized iPad. We believe this makes sense as the majority of consumers that already own an iPad seemed to be replacing it with the Air entirely, but viewed the Mini as a companion device to the larger iPad. In other words, if a consumer owns more than one iPad, it is more likely to be an iPad Air and an iPad Mini than multiple full-sized iPads. We believe our survey suggests the average upgrade cycle for the iPad is around 23 months. Based on the users buying iPad Airs who already own another iPad, the average version of the prior iPad was 2.8 (including the Mini as a “4th generation product” as it was launched with the iPad 4). At a 2.8 average version, it would put the average ownership date at around December 2011 vs. the current November 2013 launch.

Also reporting today is Cantor Fitzgerald‘s Brian White, who has a Buy rating on Apple shares, and a $777 price target, writing that “As of this afternoon, we are noticing certain iPad Air models in NYC are starting to sell out, while Hong Kong sold out quickly last night and shipping times are expanding in China.”

Rain in New York, and lack of scalping opportunities for China, may have limited some lines on 5th avenue, he opines:

Our survey of New York City stores showed a preference for the Grand Central Apple store this morning with a healthy line of at least 200-250 people; however, we easily walked into the fourth position at the Fifth Avenue Apple store and quickly purchased the iPad Air. In our view, this morning’s rain in NYC may have forced more consumers indoors to the Grand Central Station location. Additionally, the China arbitrage opportunity around the iPad Air does not exist, as China was part of Apple’s first phase launch; therefore, incremental iPad purchases from buyers at the Fifth Avenue Store were much less prevalent with this refresh.

On a different note, Barclays‘s chip analyst Robert Maire obs3erves the initial “teardown” of the iPad by early buyers, which process tends to offer the first hard data on whose chips are in a device. The folks at iFixit, of course, were on the case today, and were taking apart a unit they purchased before most other regions’ time frame, in Australia. iFixit describes a display made by LG Electronics, a DRAM component from Elpida Memory, par of Micron Technology (MU), a NAND flash cluster from Toshiba, the “M7” motion co-processor from NXP Semiconductor (NXPI), the touch-screen controller chip from Broadcom (BRCM), the Qualcomm (QCOM) LTE modem, a TriQuit Semiconductor (TQNT) power amp, RF front-end modules from Skyworks Solutions (SWKS), and further RF components from Avago Technologies (AVGO).

About all that, Maire writes it seems mostly “status quot”:

The content is fairly status quo for the incumbent suppliers, with NXP getting the sensor hub as expected. The RF section is new and does differ from the phones, with Skyworks and Avago capturing the lion’s share of the content and RFMD apparently shut out. One area of interest is the audio section, where Cirrus Logic (CRUS) did maintain the codec (same as old iPad and IP5C), but the two class-D amplifiers (~$1.00 of content) are not found in any of the photos. We outline our specific thoughts below and will continue to follow this story as it develops [...] QCOM secured the LTE modem (9615M), as expected. The RF Block featured some carryover from the IP5S/5C (AVGO chips and SKY77493), as well as a couple of new parts. In all, we believe there is greater than $13 in total RF content, which is an increase from the $7.50-8.25 content present in the prior generation. We outline our overall RF thoughts in the table below. This is a positive for Skyworks and Avago but we would highlight that the cellular versions only comprise 30-35% of the overall iPad volumes, with the iPad Air a subset of that.

Apple shares today closed down $2.67, or half a percent, at $520.03.

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